An anonymous reader writes: With 2012 about to start, it seems Verizon has decided paying your bill online or over the phone is now worthy of an extra charge. So, from January 15, anyone choosing to pay their monthly bill using either method will incur a $2 charge.

Verizon is classing the charge as a “convenience fee” which translates into them deciding allowing you to pay either online or over the phone is a convenience. They also explain in the FAQ above that the fee allows them, “to continue to support these bill payment options.” Really, Verizon? When did offering online payments or accepting phone calls from customers get so much more expensive?

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday October 31, 2011 @04:09PM
from the taking-out-the-trash dept.

Trailrunner7 writes "Microsoft Research has proposed mitigation for a known potential attack against verifiable electronic voting machines that could help prevent insiders from being able to alter votes after the fact. The countermeasure to the 'trash attack' involves adding a cryptographic hash to the receipts that voters receive (PDF). Many verifiable voting systems already include hashes on the receipts, but that hash is typically made from the ballot data for each specific voter. The idea proposed by Microsoft Research involves using a running hash that would add a hash of the previous voter's receipt to each person's receipt, ideally preventing a privileged insider from using discarded receipts to alter votes. The trash attack that the mitigation is designed to address involves election workers or others who might be motivated to change votes gathering discarded receipts and then altering those votes."

ColinPL writes: "A worker from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in the US has inadvertently exposed the personal details of up to 17,000 company employees after a mishap with a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing program."

ColinPL writes: "TorrentSpy, one of the world's largest torrent dump sites, has been ordered by a federal judge to monitor its users in order to create detailed logs of their activities which must then be handed over to the MPAA."

Teksty Piosenek writes: "Dell Inc. announced this week that it will exit the LCD television business in an effort to focus on its core competencies — mainly computer systems. Dell executives announced that the company will end production of its LCD televisions by the end of this June. Dell currently sells LCD televisions in the U.S., Japan and other smaller markets."

Teksty Piosenek writes: "Artists and record bosses believe that the best album is the loudest one. Sound levels are being artificially enhanced so that the music punches through when it competes against background noise in pubs or cars."

RFC writes: "The RIAA's campaign contributions are hard at work this week as members of Congress threaten to cut off federal funding to educational institutions if they don't stop file sharing on their networks."

RFC writes: "The House committees responsible for copyright and education wrote a joint letter May 1 scolding the presidents of 19 major American universities, demanding that each school respond to a six-page questionnaire detailing steps it has taken to curtail illegal music and movie file-sharing on campus. One of the questions — "Does your institution expel violating students?" — shows just how out-of-control the futile battle against campus downloading has become."

"Packet shaping" technology has been implemented for newsgroup applications, regardless of the provider, and all peer-to-peer networks and certain other high bandwidth applications not necessarily limited to audio, video, and voice over IP telephony. Road Runner reserves the right to implement network management tools for other applications in the future."

ColinPL writes: "China, Russia and 10 other nations were targeted by the Bush administration for failing to sufficiently protect American producers of music, movies and other copyrighted material from widespread piracy.
The Bush administration on Monday placed the 12 countries on a "priority watch list" which will subject them to extra scrutiny and could eventually lead to economic sanctions if the administration decides to bring trade cases before the World Trade Organization."

jeevesbond writes: "Hot on the heels of the revealing post from Kathy Sierra of death and sexual harm threats made against her, comes this from — well known Microsoft contractor/Web Standards blogger — Molly Holzschlag:

Today I found out that I am no longer welcome at the Web Directions event. Instead, the man who used me for the last two years to forward his career will be invited.

It appears Andy Clarke used Molly to get a book published, more details on Molly's blog post: 'Stuffed with Nonsense'."